In a usual color photographic material, a substructive color reproduction system is used. Accordingly, a color image is formed by a combination of three dyes each derived from a yellow dye-forming coupler, magenta dye-forming coupler and cyan dye-forming coupler, respectively.
As the magenta dye-forming coupler, hereinafter simply referred as "magnet coupler", pyrazolone type, pyrazolinobenzimidazole type and indanone type couplers have been known. Among them, various 5-pyrazolone derivatives are widely used.
As a substituent to be bonded at 3-position of 5-pyrazolone ring of the 5-pyrazolone derivatives, for example, an alkyl group, an aryl group, an alkoxyl group described in U.S. Pat. No. 2,439,098, an acylamino group described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,369,489 and 2,600,788, and a ureido group described in No. 3,558,319 are used. However such couplers have some defects such as that the coupling activity with the oxidation product of a color developing agent is low and a magenta image having a high optical density is difficultly obtained, a magenta dye image obtained by color development has a strong secondary absorption at blue-light region and sharpness of cut-off of the main absorption of the dye at the long wavelength end thereof is insufficient.
3-anilino-5-pyrazolone type couplers described in U.S. Pat. Nos. 2,311,081, 13,677,764 and 3,684,514, BP Nos. 956,261 and 1,173,513 each has a high coupling activity and a high color forming efficiency and the dyes formed from the couplers have a small unnecessary adsorption in the red-light region. However, a color negative film is further demanded to have a higher sensitivity and a higher color forming efficiency than those of a light-sensitive material using the above 3-anilino-5-pyrazolone type couplers.